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This book is an exploration into the uncharted territory of social reality. It explores social relations and politics, presenting a critique of contemporary socioeconomic systems and discussions on the Marxist Doctrine of Transition. The book is intended to meet Robert Heilbroner's request.

Alan Thomas’ Republic of Equals: Predistribution and Property-Owning Democracy sets itself the ambitious task of synthesising neo-republican political theory and Rawlsian justice as fairness. It is an important and challenging work that will set the stage for a great deal of the discussion not only on justice and republicanism, but also on property-owning democracy, market socialism and broader discussions of alternative economic institutions to come. After reconstructing the argument of the book, this review article turns to some specific points it raises that warrant further discussion. More precisely, it examines Thomas’ critique of market socialism, arguing that it fails to do what it sets out to do: show that market socialism is incompatible with justice as fairness. Having discussed and rejected his critique of the main other model that Thomas considers, I then turn to questions of the feasibility of POD as a feasible alternative to familiar forms of capitalism.

Ralph Austen in African Economic History (1987) noted how few African countries explicitly choose capitalism on independence, and for those who did it was a default model or a residual pattern. ‘African socialism’ was popular in the early decades of independence and pursued by several countries, including Ghana, Guinea, Senegal and Tanzania, the cases considered in this paper. The term had multiple meanings, and its advocates were quick to stress that they were not communist, and some said they were not even Marxist. This paper explores the argument that African socialism was a search for an indigenous model of economic development for a generation that was justifiably ambivalent about capitalism, but wary of being put in the communist camp in the Cold War era. Importantly, advocates of African socialism often proposed bold and transformative visions for their countries. These visions might be worth revisiting, devoid of the paradigm of socialism.

In the twentieth century, Europe and North America were at the epicentre of the century-long conflict between capitalism and socialism; more specifically, between the rule of law and the rule through law. By the early 1990s, socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe decayed from within leaving in its wake economic misery and intellectual emptiness. Yet, socialism is raising its head once again. This new variant of socialism, which I call ‘liberal socialism’, has one critical difference that sets it apart from its predecessors. Unlike all three types of socialism in the last century – Fascism, National Socialism and Communism – liberal socialism is not imposed from the top down; it is emerging from the bottom up. The incentive effects of increasing redistributional governmental programmes map a road to liberal socialism by influencing the median voter and weakening private property rights. However, election results in many European countries, and at state and local levels in the United State...

From Marx to Althusser, the materialist approach has tended to assume that individuals (that is, workers, proletarians and other social actors) unconsciously reproduce the social structures of capitalism that alienate them. It is assumed that individuals accept the conditions forced upon them and no longer seek to rebel against a world that substantially impoverishes their labour, their spirit and their creativity. In this paper, I suggest that by favouring Marx’s concept of alienation almost exclusively, there is a considerable risk that materialist thought will take only a negative path and remain stuck in the very Hegelian idealism that it intends to surpass. Whilst I acknowledge Marx’s significance to materialism, I argue that his stance should be combined with that of the anarchist and libertarian French thinker Proudhon. Proudhon presents a conception of the worker as more than just alienated. Workers can also cooperate and experience a reciprocity seemingly at odds with the character of capitalism. Under Proudhon’s influence materialism takes a positive turn, enabling us to avoid falling into the utopianism that the theory of social economy employs to critique capitalism—a utopianism that renders its critique even less effective than that of Marx. Today, Proudhonian theory also allows us to envisage the end of capitalism without necessarily rejecting the very concept of work. It thus improves on theories of ‘basic income’, for example, which persist in seeing in work nothing but negativity.

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 holds important lessons for the socialist movement today. To learn these lessons, it is necessary to have an accurate picture of both the achievements and the...

Much of the current conversation about social justice, economic responsibility and individual self-realization is informed by an explicit or implicit comparison between capitalist and socialist modernities. The Soviet Union’s variety of socialism understandably serves as a critical master referent in this conversation. In this regard, a dominant historical narrative that ties the history of Soviet socialism to the Bolshevik origins imposes serious limitation to available depictions of socialism and histories of the twentieth century. This article turns the Bolshevik fundamentals assigned to the Soviet project into a problem of historical analysis and argues that the Soviet experience has more than one normative vision of socialism to offer. The goal is to foreground the divergence of normative conceptions of the socialist society and individual by historicizing the two principal and presently closely identified ideological-educational undertakings: those of the New Man and the ‘New Soviet Person’....

Recent scholarship has considered the requirements of justice and economic regimes in the work of John Rawls. This work has not delved into the requirements of justice and liberal socialism as deeply as the work done on property-owning democracy. A thorough treatment of liberal socialism and the requirements of justice is needed. This paper seeks to begin to fill this gap. It will be argued that liberal socialism does significantly better in realizing the two principles of justice. In this paper, first an overview of Rawls’ position on economic regimes, capitalism, and the requirements of justice will be given. In particular it will be considered, how the two principles work in tandem to meet the demands of distributive justice. Secondly, property-owning democracy will be reviewed. Finally, liberal socialism will be examined and discussed as an economic regime that answers the requirements of justice more fully.

To explain the failure to create democratic socialism in Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, I apply Thorstein Veblen’s vision of economic democracy as a cure for vested interests. In late imperial Russia, many socialist thinkers imagined socialism primarily in terms of workplace democracy, worker ownership, local governance, and economic decentralization. Their vision was destroyed, first, by Bolshevik policies and then by Stalin’s tyrannical command economy. Thereafter, vested interests reemerged in the Soviet Union as an underground economy, rife with theft of public resources, and then, with the beginning of transition, capitalism in its most neoliberal form was restored.

This paper discusses the reality and the prospect of the world socialist movement in the twenty-first century. Capitalist crises are regarded as important opportunities to study the characteristics of world socialist development in this paper. The development characteristics and the general patterns of world capitalism and world socialism in their mutual competition after the three capitalist crises are studied first. Then, after analysis, the author believes that there are four characteristics of world socialism: the socialist system has gained a wider institutional advantage over capitalism; China has become a mainstay of the development and revitalization of world socialism; in their long struggle, the balance of power between world socialism and world capitalism will change historically in favor of world socialism; the number of socialist countries and the degree of the socialism realization has become the standards to judge socialist development. Finally, the author concludes that the possibi...

Muslim socialist views of M. Vahitov are formed under infl uence of 1905–1907 revolution events (acquaintance to Bolshevik H. Yamashev). After the February revolution he returned to Kazan (after education in St. Petersburg), where became a central fi gure in social-democratic movement. At the beginning of April 1917 Vahitov organized and headed Muslim socialist committee which pursued a policy in course of social-democratic movement. This committee stood up for spreading Socialist ideas in the milieu of proletariat and peasants and for the formation of national counsel as an organ of national autonomy. The 7 August 1918 after taking Kazan by the “Whites” armed forces Vahitov was captured and the 19 August shouted by verdict of court martial in dark circumstances.

Against the backdrop of the 19th century, the First International, guided by Marxism, emerged in the form of the early “International Socialist Federation.” It viewed the seizure of power as the gr...

Bernie Sanders, who claims to be a “socialist,” surprisingly rises from the 2016 US Democratic presidential primaries, and has created a socialist vision for future America. The “socialism” he has self-claimed for is virtually democratic socialism. Sander’s meteoric rise in the election polls indicates that capitalist crisis is increasingly exacerbated; meanwhile, socialist thought tends to revitalize in the United States and other capitalist countries. The “socialism” Sanders has claimed will not take place in the United States, yet the historical tendency that socialism will inevitably replace capitalism is not going to change.

The basic idea of democratic socialism is straightforward: the only socialism worthy of its name is one that preserves individual liberty and democratic procedures, while simultaneously extending the values of democracy to the economic sphere. But the twentieth century has provided, on the one hand, examples of authoritarian socialism, and, on the other, welfare state capitalism, neither of which meets the standard. If it is clear what democratic socialism is not, the harder question of what it is remains contested. Regardless of the eventual outcome, Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly robust performance in the Democratic primary makes this an opportune moment to revisit that debate.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to trace the relationship between social media and socialism. Design/methodology/approach – The design of this paper is to articulate what is socialism and social media. We trace the relationship between the two based on quotations and citations between these two separate universes of discourse. Findings – Social media leads to socialism; this is the most unsophisticated understanding of economics, and pretty much anyone can take part in this mode of communication. The economically illiterate excoriate capitalism, but they fail, utterly, to distinguish between the crony capitalism, which really does exploit workers and the poor, from laissez-faire capitalism, which is the last best hope for humanity to prosper and even to survive. Originality/value – There is great originality in this paper because there is no other extant study that attempts to explain social media and socialism in terms of each other.

Four Latin American nations have rejected not only neoliberalism and US imperialism, but also capitalism, and they are seeking to construct post-capitalist societies evolving in practice toward socialism. Charismatic leaders have played a principal role in the socialist projection: Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The governments of these four nations have developed new constitutions, restructured external debt payments, taken control of natural recourses, directed investments toward needs of the people and national production, and developed structures of popular participation. The four nations and their charismatic leaders have played a central role in the creation of a new political reality in Latin America.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the revival of left-wing politics, there has been a thriving variety of debates and explorations of twenty-first century socialism in Latin America. The socialist traditions of the region are deep and rich, but few of them were successful. How were Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador able to realize their distinctive models of twenty-first century socialism in peripheral areas? Through a retrospect of the origins and logic of twenty-first century socialism in Latin America, this article attempts to analyze the opportunities and challenges faced by twenty-first century socialism, followed by its historical essence and significance.

Our task is to reflect upon Wagar's idea of a world party. In case such reflections are affected by the recent historical situation of the collapse of communism/existing socialism in 1989 and the implications this has for visions of progressive politics going into the 21st century. This event colors most political thinking, although for many the response has been that existing socialism was not real socialism, or that existing socialism was but the Stalinist deformation that, if avoided in the future, the 1917 project could again be resumed and human history and social relations remade anew. I don't see it that way. What existing socialism stood for in terms of the role of a vanguard party taking state power for the larger good is, now after the fall, I think off the board as a realistic program that can be sold to anyone.

From within the common national, gradualist, and liberal narrative of emancipation, Major General John C. Fremont’s proclamation of August 30, 1861, emancipating all the slaves of disloyal Missourians, appears as a recklessly premature step threatening to derail the progress of freedom in the United States. Fremont’s proclamation, however, was not simply a misstep in the national process of legislating emancipation. Rather, it reflected, and perhaps attempted to justify, extralegal processes of emancipation already taking place in the Trans-Mississippi West. These were the self-emancipatory efforts of slaves themselves, the ongoing antislavery guerrilla warfare of Kansas Jayhawkers, and the military strategies of European, especially German, revolutionary socialists. This essay only focuses only on the last group, the European socialists, to highlight how the Civil War, arguably the central turning point in US history, was also an important episode in a larger revolutionary drama pitting plebian proponents of democracy against concentrations of wealth, whether of slaveholders or of capitalists, and also against concentrations of elite power in the limited, liberal state.

During the 1950s, China’s hybrid economy recovered from years of war and crisis. China’s Communist revolutionaries and “national capitalists” (minzu zibenjia 民族资本家) cooperated in this effort and were often successful, but the relationship was not unproblematic. This article focuses on the survival strategies of factory owners in the silk industry during what the Chinese Community Party terms the “socialist transformation of private industry and commerce.” This process was initiated and mobilized by the central government but implemented by local officials, and it was influenced by capitalists’ diverse responses, which showed adaptability, perseverance, manipulation, and even resistance. One surprising discovery is that many factory owners welcomed effective state involvement in the economy, such as expansion of the system of state-contracted production in private firms, and agitated to accelerate the transition to socialism. From the Five Antis Campaign in 1952 through the “socialist high tide” of 1956, the relationship between private businesses and the state changed dramatically and reshaped China’s economy, often in unpredictable ways. In this light, China’s transition to socialism appears more complex and contested than historians have previously imagined. Keywords: China, revolution, capitalist, communist, socialist transformation, private business, industry, silk, state-contracted production, Five Antis Campaign

In a recent article, Bernice Lott suggests that modern psychology has failed to investigate in any systematic fashion existing beliefs and attitudes surrounding socialism. While there is much to commend in Lott's analysis, her support for a social democratic version of socialism tends to obscure the more revolutionary potentials of socialist practice. To adequately address social and environmental justice, I argue that the trajectory of psychological research and practice must be brought into alignment with a socialism that is committed to interrogating and ultimately destabilizing the capitalist mode of production.

One of the pervasive myths about the United States is that it has never had a socialist movement comparable to other industrialized nations. Yet in the early 20th century a vibrant Socialist Party and socialist movement flourished in the United States. Created in 1901, the Socialist Party of America unsurprisingly declared its primary goal to be the collectivization of the means of production. Yet the party’s highly decentralized and democratic structure enabled it to adapt to the needs and cultures of diverse constituencies in different regions of the country. Among those attracted to the movement in its heyday were immigrant and native-born workers and their families, tenant farmers, middle-class intellectuals, socially conscious millionaires, urban reformers, and feminists. Party platforms regularly included the reform interests of these groups as well as the long-term goal of eradicating capitalism. By 1912, the Socialist Party boasted an impressive record of electoral successes at the local, state, and national levels. U.S. Socialists could also point with pride to over three hundred English and foreign-language Socialist periodicals, some with subscription rates that rivaled those of the major urban daily newspapers. Yet Socialists faced numerous challenges in their efforts to build a viable third-party movement in the United States. On the one hand, progressive reformers in the Democratic and Republican parties sought to coopt Socialists. On the other hand, the Socialist Party encountered challenges on the left from anarchists, syndicalists, communists, and Farmer-Labor Party activists. The Socialist Party was particularly weakened by government repression during World War I, by the postwar Red Scare, and by a communist insurgency within its ranks in the aftermath of the war. By the onset of the Great Depression, the Communist Party would displace the Socialist Party as the leading voice of radical change in the United States.

Putting forward the socialist core values is a further understanding to deepen the socialism essence and the law of socialism development by communist party of China, Socialist core values reflects the unifying of teleology and regularity, integrity and hierarchy, openness and national character. The legality of the Chinese communist party has been confirmed through the history and reality. The moral foundation of the Chinese communist party has been reinforced and widely accepted and reached a consensus by the socialist core values, which has been promoting through the values of advocacy, the behavior way of persuasion, public opinion on the public opinion. The people in Minority area are simple, honest and unspoiled, through the guidance of socialist core values, can further strengthen moral consciousness in minority areas, and through the benign ecological construction, it supports moral ethical for economic and social development in the areas of China's minority.

Neoliberal economic theory has become ascendant in America in recent decades, and this body of theoretical work has been used to shape public policy in profound ways across the globe. Neoliberal ideas have routinely been put to use in fields not traditionally associated with economics, including higher education, where neoliberal theory has found a central place in public policy. A careful examination of F.A. Hayek’s book, The Road To Serfdom, perhaps the most essential of all neoliberal documents, reveals a set of ideas that many individuals familiar with the modern political version of neoliberalism might not recognize. Hayek suggests here that governments should provide “security against severe physical privation” (147) and aid in “the reduction of the avoidable causes of misdirected effort and consequent disappointment” (156).

Throughout this book, I have constantly invoked Marxism as being more conducive to understanding racism and its relationship to capitalist society than Critical Race Theory; and have defended Marxism against CRT critiques of it. In order to both substantiate my defence of, and indeed, exaltation of the modern Marxist project; in order specifically to argue CRT attempts to render it passe, no longer relevant, racist and oppressive, it is incumbent on me to justify the overall strengths of Marxism as a worldview.

In this chapter, the empirical evidence for supreme values will be discussed for National Socialism, Communism, and Christian and Islamic believes.

Social democracy offers a familiar vision of the future, building on its history, principles, and institutions. Less known is the leftist perspective known as market socialism.

Socialism produces distinct forms of humorous ridicule that are relatively rare in capitalist, bourgeois democracies. These forms are arranged in a hierarchy that reflects the distribution of power in this type of social and political order, one which differs markedly from a bourgeois democracy or indeed even a traditional or dictatorial authoritarian society. Merely authoritarian societies lack the kind of over-riding ideology and central control of economic and cultural life that are the defining characteristics of socialism. Socialist humorous ridicule is cruel at the top; then comes an aggressive and admonishing, but in intention humorous, official ridicule employed by the state in pursuit of centrally defined political ends. Finally, there is the ridicule by ordinary people of the elite and the social order they have imposed on the masses who respond by spontaneously and autonomously inventing and circulating innumerable jokes and anecdotes. This pattern is a product of the exercise of a monopoly of political and economic power by the leaders of the Communist Party and the distinctive political inequality that characterises socialism, an inequality based not on ownership but on differential access to the power of the state. The rulers of merely authoritarian societies that were not socialist such as Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile or Afrikaner South Africa did not and could not attain the same kind of hegemony that was possible under socialism because there existed economic, religious, scientific and even legal institutions that enjoyed a substantial degree of independence from their political rulers. Accordingly, they did not exhibit to anything like the full extent the patterns of humour to be found under socialism. The aggregate patterns of humour in socialist societies must be treated not as interactions between individuals but as ‘social facts’ to be understood in relation to other social facts, notably the nature of political power, with both sets of social facts being contrasted with those to be found in the capitalist democracies that are the antithesis of socialism.

As early as the revolutionary wars, Mao Zedong clearly pointed out the future path of the Chinese revolution: to go through the new democratic revolution and advance uninterruptedly into the stage of socialist revolution, and finally to build socialism and communism. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, he created and continuously improved the socialist economic system and the corresponding political system, led the large-scale socialist economic, political and cultural construction, established the institutional preconditions, ideological guarantees and material basis for socialism with Chinese characteristics, and brought about a favorable external environment for China’s socialist construction. During this process, Mao originated a series of theories about China’s socialist construction. In proposing to achieve the second combination of the universal truth of Marxism with China’s realities and to go China’s own way and explore a path of building socialism which suits China’s national c...

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) held its Second Sub-forum on International Marxism in Beijing on November 16–17, 2013, with left-wing scholars in the areas of economics, philosophy, political science and international relations in attendance. The theme for the forum was “Socialism and the World Today,” and in this relation participants discussed the development of Marxism and socialism in the twenty-first century. The gathering was an impressive success, and this review takes up the following aspects of the research presented during the proceedings. In first place is the need to meet the challenges of the time, promoting continual innovation and development in the areas of Marxist theory and world socialism. A second aspect is the need for theoretical research into, and thorough understanding of, the capitalist economic crisis. A third aspect is represented by criticism and analysis of contemporary capitalist society, and a fourth by theory and discussion on socialism and on socialism with C...

Tugan-Baranovsky’s ideas on socialism are reconstructed with an emphasis on the relation between political economy and utopia. Utopia enters the stage after the critique of capitalism, in the definition of the realm of possibilities in the world of ideas. With the help of ethics, the notion of ideal socialism, unreachable by definition, is defined in the sphere of utopia. Thus, the task of political economy is first to show which of these possible worlds are reachable in the real world, and second to choose the one that conforms better to ideal socialism: this is socialism in practice through the economic plan. Thus, far from considering utopia and science as contradictory, Tugan-Baranovsky saw them as complementary, and his socialism is the result of the dialogue he instituted between them. Les idées de Tugan-Baranovsky sur le socialisme sont reconstruites dans ce papier en portant un regard particulier sur la relation entre l'économie politique et l'utopie. L'utopie fait son entrée après la critique du capitalisme, dans la définition de l'univers des possibles, dans le monde des idées. La notion de socialisme idéal, inatteignable par définition, est définie dans la sphère de l'utopie à l'aide de l'éthique. Ainsi, la tâche de l'économie politique devient d'abord de montrer parmi ces mondes possibles ceux qui sont atteignables dans le monde réel, et ensuite de choisir celui qui se conforme le mieux à l'idéal socialiste: c'est le socialisme pratique à travers le plan économique. Ainsi, loin de considérer l'utopie et la science comme contradictoires, Tugan-Baranovsky les considère comme complémentaires, et son socialisme est le résultat du dialogue qu'il institue entre elles.